Books of 2020- Installment #24

116. Undeading Bells by Drew Hayes and read by Kirby Heyborne

I just love this series and hope there are more coming!!!

117. Small Spaces by Katherine Arden
This is a really interesting Halloween story for children though not very young children. It's rather frightening. There's this encounter with a woman at a swimming hole that leads our main character into understanding a world that helps her on a scary, scary school trip... This book seriously reminded me of The Winter People.

118. I Remember You: A Ghost Story by Yrsa Sigurdardottir and read by Lucy Paterson

This Icelandic story is really interesting. We follow three people who go to an island in winter to remodel a house. Not a good plan! Turns out it's haunted- double not a good plan! Since we aren't attached to these people when the story opens and this book is a translation of a culture I don't know much about done in British English, read by a Brit, I found there to be so many layers of questions about what was going on in this book. 

119. Spoiler Alert by Olivia Dade

This book is soooooooooooo good!! It's gotten lots of great press and it's totally deserved!! Totally deserved!! It's so good!!! Basically we follow a geologist - yay!!!- who is also a fan girl. Her fandom leads her to writing fanfic and developing a relationship with another fanfic writer that is a really deep and important relationship. Then... Oops! Spoilers!!

120. The Heirs of Locksley by Carrie Vaughn

So of course I was going to complete the duology. This one is even more not about Robin as is obvious from the title.

I've read 120 books and 85 were by woman, 29 were by men, 3 were anthologies by both women and men, 2 were by nonbinary authors, and 1 had no author listed. Additionally 11 1/2 were translations (although the book 3 American Indian Stories could be a translation as well). My year of reading lots of women and at least 12 translations is going well in that I've read mostly female authors, but the world is going through a pandemic and state sanctioned murders in the form of police brutality with a horrible man still at the helm and supported by horrible men in the Congress. In short this year has been really rough. What will this global health crisis leave us with? What changes will we make, not only in terms of the huge inequities of our health system where people of color and the poor (which let's face it- the system works really hard to ensure that people of color, especially black people, are poor) are more than extremely disadvantaged, but also all the other ways in which our society, our systems, actively damage people of color? Only time will tell. But I hope it is a greater sense of community, a need to care for one and another and support each other, not just people with the same colored skin as ourselves, not just people with the same sized wallet as ours. My naive? hope is all of this isolation leaves us wanting to lift each other up and not hold others down.